While photograph applications, video applications, and other content sharing applications have become increasingly popular, the services and features currently provided by these sorts of applications come with inherent limitations. Recognizing these limitations, online content management systems purport to offer a user a convenient portal for cloud storage and interactivity with his or her content. However, in such systems, as well as in the applications running on user devices which they support, content tends to be organized within a user's “account.” Within an account there may be various folders, collections, and other groupings, but such groupings may be performed by content type, and not necessarily based upon the people with whom certain content items are regularly shared. It is noted, though, that in their own minds, people do not organize data in folders or file hierarchies. Certain content items, such as, for example, photographs and videos, are understood to be related not just by their inherent content, but also by the set of people with whom they are naturally shared. In some embodiments, content items may be organized based on the content included within the content items. For example, a user may organize certain subsets of their image content, for example, as “family vacation shots,” “Bob's wedding photos,” “videos from grandma and grandpa's fortieth wedding anniversary” or, for example, “photos of the new restaurant site our architecture team is developing.” Should a user wish to share such content items, or even a collection of them, he or she may do so with whomever the user wishes. However, in order for one or more recipients of these content items or collections to share additional content items, or provide feedback to the shared content items or collections, the recipient must individually select each new recipient. This problem becomes especially cumbersome and problematic when the number of people involved in a shared collection reaches large numbers (e.g., 1,000 users). This problem may be further exacerbated by the fact that multiple users may attempt to share many similar content items, or due to network latencies experienced by different users located in different areas.
Thus, it would be beneficial for developing means that enable collective sharing of content between groups of users regardless of network conditions and the size of the group. The collective sharing may allow groups of users to communicate shared content with each user of the group as well as providing a forum that the shared content may be easily accessed and interacted with by any of the parties included therein.